


The Crane in White

by snagov



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Creature Castiel (Supernatural), Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fairy Tale Elements, Love, M/M, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Non-Hunter Winchesters (Supernatural), POV Dean Winchester, Pining, Romance, Secret Identity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-01
Updated: 2020-06-01
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:41:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24492934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snagov/pseuds/snagov
Summary: Once upon a time, there was a little crane who fell in love with a human. He prayed every night to be made human to be with his love. Once upon a time, Dean Winchester found a small white crane.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 10
Kudos: 43





	The Crane in White

_Do you not know yet? Throw the emptiness out of your arms  
__to add to the spaces we breathe; maybe the birds  
__will feel the expansion of air, in more intimate flight.  
_Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus

  
  


It is a strange truth that all of mankind reaches up to the sky. We always have. We imagine that all heavens are up there, somewhere past the clouds (all hells are underground, stamped beneath our dirty feet). It is wide and bright, blue as chromium, blue as the veins on the underside of a wrist. We scrape at it, hoping to draw the firmament down to us. It does not come, of course. The only way to meet the sky is to have wings. Our clumsy human bodies do not have wings, we never have. Instead, we have clever hands that shape wings out of aluminum and occasionally steel. We snatch moments of flight, desperate to cast off into the air. It is never quite what we want, this pale imitation, but it is all that we may have. Dean Winchester is jealous of the crane that comes near his house, that beats those massive wings in effortless flight, the comfort of mastery of both earth and air. Dean Winchester would like to fly.

The first time that he sees the white crane, Dean is drinking a Milwaukee Old Style and thinking about snow. It is February, that late end of winter when everyone is already over it, when snow is no longer enchanting but instead a grey and icy, sloshy mess. It’s snowing again, it will warm up later in the evening, just enough to turn the flakes into an icy rain. Cars will be encased in sheets of ice come morning, like they are held behind plexiglass in a museum. His neighbors will emerge with their ice scrapers at dawn, hacking and chipping away at their windshields, picking their way through the frozen seal. It’s been snowing and below freezing since late November; it will be miserable and cold until at least April. The sun sets at five o’clock. These months are long, ever cold and dark. Dean hates them; he is waiting for summer. He waits for the promise of that one March day that is gentler than the rest, bearing the mark of warmer weather and fog, of rain and grass and low-pressure systems.

It is _well_ past two o’clock in the morning; he has never been good with sleep. (It is part and parcel of being Dean Winchester, it comes with a weakness for pie and cheap beer, high cholesterol and an old copy of _Exile on Main Street._ )

Sam had lent him some books to help him sleep. They pile up on his bedside table next to glasses of water and tissues, an old digital alarm clock and his worn leather watch. Dean is fond of the ones on myths and legends, on old fairytales. They remind him of his mother, pale-haired and paler-faced, who had read them to the boys in a clear voice. _Once upon a time,_ she had said (that was how they always started). His favorite is the one on the little white crane. It has been his favorite since he was eight years old, when he had heard it for the first time from his mother’s voice as he was falling asleep. Had dreamt that night of a powerful white crane with eyes like the winter sky.

_Once upon a time, there was a little crane, who was lonely and who had white wings. He was the littlest of his brothers and sisters and they teased him for daydreaming too much. Once, he was wounded. A human prince picked the thorn out of the crane’s wing and set it. The crane fell in love with the prince and prayed daily to God to be made human to be with his love. An angel came to grant his wish. “Your wings will come back at night. But heed me, little one, you must be careful not to let him take a single one of your feathers, for without them all, you can never return.”_

She had often read to them, Dean and his brother. Her voice was always soft as a song, hoping that the children will tire and drift off into sleep. Later, when she is gone (a house fire, they will tell him), his father will not crack open the books, will not read to them. Instead, Dean starts telling the stories himself, hoping to lure Sam into sleep. _Everything will be okay,_ he had told the little towheaded toddler, _I promise, Sam._ (No longer a child there, age six. What is one less child in the world?)

 _You do what you gotta do._ (This is the beginning of Dean Winchester.)

Like most February nights in Michigan, it is snowing. It is a bit less magical during the day, when the cars slosh through, turning it dull and grey. It gets in the boots, soaks the bottom of your pants with wet and the white telltale stain of road salt. At night, however, a fresh powder is otherworldly and magical. It slows the rush of things, silences the loudness of our screeching earth. Everything is blotted out, as if an eraser had been taken to the grass, to the houses, to the roads. Fresh again, clean, pure. Aquarius season, the water-bearer, represented by Ganymede. (How does the old story go? Once upon a time, Ganymede had lived on earth, beautiful and human. Zeus had fallen in love with the boy, had abducted him to serve as a cup-bearer on Mount Olympus. Dean always wonders about this, we are told of Zeus’ love, of his devotion to Ganymede. But we are never able to learn of the boy’s feelings, loved without input, without agency, taken away from the only home he has ever known. Love can be a terrible mistress. Possession is no idle thing.)

It happens then, very quick. A shadow passes across the moon, dark and rapid. Dean thinks it looks a bit like a crane, if you squint a little. _It’s just a trick of the light, there are no cranes here in February. And you should stop drinking for the night, you useless idiot._

There are, of course, no such things as fairytales.

* * *

Some desires are rooted in fear. We are creatures of opposites, light and dark, dry and wet, left and right. We are never sure of the center, never sure of moderation. So then, naturally, our desire to fly is spurred on by our fear of _under._ We are afraid of falling. Afraid of digging underground, perhaps. Or worse, in that deep, dank darkness of the sea. Dean is a Great Lakes man. The midwestern United States rolls out in the middle, centering itself around two great physical markers. First, the Great Plains that cover Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas in corn and wheatfields. Those amber waves of grain. And then, up there in the north, are the lakes. Michigan is the heart of the lakecountry, that jutting peninsula of forest and shoreline. Dunes and windswept long grasses, silica sand.

Dean was born to Michigan, in a little town on the coast of Lake Superior. The town, to the great delight of passing motorists, is called Knucklebone. They take pictures of themselves with the sign. _Knucklebone, population 3,358._ They don’t need much, up there with the wolves and the trees, that ice cold deep. To put your toe into the water is to remember the shipwrecks. Every child in the town grows up on the tales of shipwrecks, of the Edmund Fitzgerald caught in a winter storm, sunk forever in November 1975. To touch the water of the lake is to touch the reaching fingertips of the dead.

* * *

The second time around, Dean drops his keys to the shop on the ice.

The old bookshop, there on the corner of Superior and Main. Redbricked and white-doored, a bell that rings when someone pushes the door open, comes in from the cold. It’s a little thing, hardly worth keeping in business save for online orders. Sam had bought it years ago, had given it the entirely uninspired name (in Dean’s own personal opinion) of _Winchester Books._ It opens at ten in the morning and closes at seven in the evening, Monday through Sunday. Dean shelves the new arrivals which come in on Tuesdays, he re-alphabetizes the bookcases. He knows all the books and their covers intimately, even without ever opening them. He doesn’t need to. Titles and authors swirl about him. Vladimir Nabokov belongs in Fiction and Agatha Christie in Mystery. He shelves Anne Sexton in Poetry and walks Nora Ephron to Humor. He has spent so much time with these books, taking them down and putting them back up again, that he doesn’t need to look them up. (Books on fairytales take up just a little part of a shelf under the Mythology section, shoved into the same space as Literary Criticism. Joseph Campbell would roll over in his grave.)

He closes up, as always, at a little bit after seven-thirty. It never takes long to reshelve the last books, to count down the cash drawer, sweep the wood floor, turn off the lights. In February, it is always dark when he leaves. He hates these short days. (If you bump into him at a bar, he will claim to prefer night. This is not true, Dean is a creature of the sun. He loves the feel of the sunlight on his arms, on his face. He loves the long golden sun of late summer afternoons. These are his favorite moments.)

“Holy shit,” he breathes. It is in the dead center of the empty parking lot.

This time, the crane stands right in front of him, bathed in the pool of a streetlamp. It is a whooping crane, _Grus americana_. He’s always been a bit fascinated by cranes, maybe it’s the old legend, so he’s taken to reading up on them. There are two species native to North America. Sandhill cranes are the color of the silica and feldspar sand next to Lake Michigan, the color of Sleeping Bear Dunes. They have existed for over nine million years, the oldest living bird species. Majestically built, they are the size of a small adult human, reaching five foot and their wings, if stretched, span six to seven feet. It is difficult to tell scale when they are striking against the sky. The whooping crane though, that’s something else, something still more precious and endangered. In 1941, the whooping crane population had been reduced through hunting and habitat erosion to only twenty-three birds. Now, with a more robust population, they still teeter on the edge of endangerment, threatened by their own beauty, their own snow-white feathers that greedy men hope to claim.

Dean studies the feathers, white as flame, invisible against the snowdrift. The bird is only seen by the long, spindly black legs, the dark and pointed bill, the strange crimson crown it bears atop its head. Dean holds his breath, unsure why, but that there is something sacred in the presence of this creature, that Dean is blessed by its proximity.

Down here, up close, they are _magical._

And they shouldn’t be here in February. Their migration patterns are older than humanity. They fly up over the continental U.S. in the spring, settling to breed in Canada, in Wisconsin, here in Michigan. In October, as the days shorten and the weather turns cool, they retreat to Florida, to Cuba, to Mississippi. It is at least two or three months before Dean should see the first sign of a robin, long before there should be the first sign of a crane. He aches to get closer to the creature, to the wings slightly held out in cautious and keen awareness of how Dean steps slightly closer, heel to ball and quiet on the asphalt. _It’s okay, little guy, I won’t hurt you._ The crane stares at him, frank and direct, and Dean has the oddest feeling of the intelligence in that gaze.

His keys slip from his pocket. Smash against the pavement in a haze of dissonance. Startled, the crane takes off in a flurry of wings. Dean stares after it, into the sky where it once was, for a very long time.

* * *

“Can I help you?” Dean says, he doesn’t look up. The stack of used books is steadily growing smaller next to him, his wide, tanned hands working quickly to place price stickers over the back barcodes. None of these are particularly desirable used books. Desirable, to a bookshop, does not always mean good. Instead, those are the books in demand, the authors and titles that the rest of the town comes in for and clamors to buy. He has plenty of copies already of _Wuthering Heights_ , that one is never priced highly. But a recent bestseller would command so much more.

“I am looking for a book,” the customer says. Dean slaps a $2.00 sticker on a copy of _Sense and Sensibility_ and looks up. He pauses in surprise, the customer is much younger than his voice, rusty as an iron gate. Dark-haired, standing strangely nervously at the counter and fidgeting in his ill-fitting beige trenchcoat.

“Okay, sure, that’s a thing we do here,” he grins (Sam always says that Dean has a knack for putting people at ease), “What book are you looking for?”

“Fairytales.”

“Oh yeah, sure, we have a couple of titles in stock, I can show you where -”

“Dean,” the man says, squinting to read the name from Dean’s lanyard, “I checked those already. Can you help me find one with the story of _The Little Crane_?”

It hits Dean in a queer way, the mention of that tale. He is not quite sure why. _The Little Crane_ is not an unknown fairytale by any means. It is included in many anthologies, most children can tell a version or two. It has even been animated once or twice, though never a commercial success. Perhaps it is because it is within the book sitting on Dean’s bedside table, _The Galbraith Anthology of World Fairytales: Second Edition._ Perhaps it is because he has seen a crane recently, who looked back at him. Perhaps, most immediate of all, it is because of the unnerving way this odd man makes direct and unwavering eye contact, as if he has never learned the basic human decency of looking away. (Dean does not often notice a customer’s eyes, well, anyone’s eyes. But he had been held into that gaze like a magnet. The man’s eyes are blue as the lake and the sky.)

“Oh,” he says, looking away first. He pulls up the search program on his computer. “We don’t have anything else right now, sorry about that. But I know a book that’s got it in there, so I can order it for you if you want?” Dean spins the monitor around to show the man, the _Galbraith Anthology_ pulled up on the screen. Hardcover, published June 2014, a reasonable price of $35.00. “It’d be here in about three to four days, tops.” The other man leans in, nearly touching his hand to the screen. A deep furrow appears between the dark brows. “You want it?” Dean asks, only to break the uncomfortably stretching silence.

A pause, yet again. “Yes,” comes the dark voice.

“Okay,” he says, pulling up the order information, “What’s your name?”

The man looks at him with wide blue eyes, “Castiel.”

“You got a last name there, Cas?” If anything, the man looks still more panicked. There is a fierce shake to the head. _What the hell?_ “Alright,” Dean says, “I won’t pressure you.” He moves on to the next thing, “What about an address?”

Castiel’s eyes get wider, he shakes his head. “It’s okay,” Dean says, “Don’t worry, I can just order it here to the store.” A pause, his mind rushes. “Do you - um, I’m not sure I should ask this but you do have somewhere to go later, right? Cause it’s gonna snow like hell tonight and no one should be out in that.” The polar vortex is a constant presence, looming in from Canada, inching closer over Ontario. It plunges the midwest into bitter cold, icicles freeze on eyelashes, men die in the night, never able to stretch out their legs.

“No,” it is quiet and bewildered. Dean doesn’t quite know what to make of it. He will never understand the exact confluence of reasons that brings him to his next sentence (Sam will later say that Dean’s heart is softer than he thinks it is).

“Look, you’re gonna come home with me, alright? Stay the night, we’ll get you all fixed up tomorrow, okay? We’ve got a spare room, nothin’ fancy. It’s just my brother and me.” Castiel stares at Dean for a long heartbeat, entire civilizations rise and fall in that span, before slowly nodding.

“Thank you, Dean.” It is very quiet. Dean shifts uncomfortably. He is not a _thank you_ kind of guy. His own gratitude is one thing but it always itches at him when offered it. To accept a _thank you_ is to agree that what you’ve done is worthy of it. He knows he’s nothing special; he is worthy of nothing at all.

“Don’t mention it.”

* * *

“Sam,” Dean drops his bag at the door, kicks it to the side. Knock the snow off, hang up the heavy winter coat. Castiel is not dressed for winter, not for a winter in northern Michigan. His coat is made of beige cotton gabardine but it is not thick. There is no scarf nor hat to defend against the cutting wind. His ears are red with cold. Dean’s own ears ache with sympathy, he knows that pain of the edge of frostbite, how it hurts more once you come in from the cold. “Sam, we got a visitor tonight.”

A towheaded man looks up from a laptop, hair falling in his face. “Oh hey.”

“Sam, this is Cas. Cas, this is Sam, my brother. He owns the shop.”

“Hello Sam,” Castiel says, that dark baritone. “You have a very nice bookstore.”

Sam grins, the bookstore is a quick way to his heart. “Don’t let Dean drive you too crazy, Cas. Make yourself at home.”

Dean rolls his eyes, he nudges Castiel, “You hungry?” Castiel turns to him, tilting his head and eyes widening as if he is just now realizing his own hunger. He nods vigorously. Dean laughs. “Okay, cool. We’re makin’ burgers tonight, if you’re cool with that.” He eyes the increasing snowfall outside. “I mean, we’re definitely not touching the grill ‘cause of Mr. Freeze out there, but the grill pan’ll do alright.”

“Okay,” the snowflakes melt on Castiel’s face, leaving drops of water on his cheekbones, his forehead, wetting his hair. Dean’s hand twitches with the odd impulse to wipe it away. _Slow your roll, dude._

“Yeah, alright. Here, I’ll show you your room.” He grabs a couple of towels, a few of his old shirts and sleep shorts. Pajama pants. Pair of jeans. Castiel appears to be slightly shorter than Dean is, but not by much. When Dean leaves, he pulls the door to his own bedroom shut very tightly. Rests his hot forehead against the cool glass of the icy windowpane. His faint reflection stares back. The sand-colored hair, the grass-colored eyes, forgettably suntanned skin that hardly fades, even in the winter. _Get a fucking grip, man._

* * *

The thing about snow is it is so _silencing._ After a snowfall, everything burrows. In the dead of night, there are no birds cutting across the sky, no squirrels fidgeting in trees, no man stirs out of the house. The world is soft as the space after a breath, before it shakes it all out, takes another, starts over.

“Dean?” The low voice in the dark. Dean stumbles over the edge of the couch. He had not expected anyone to be awake at four in the morning.

“Yeah?”

“Where are you going?”

“Nowhere big, Cas, just gonna plow some of this snow,” he pauses, “Why are you up? It’s stupid early, dude.”

“I cannot sleep.”

“Oh,” he fiddles with the keyring in his hand, “Do you wanna come with me? I could use the company.”

“Of course.”

The garage is single-stall and that’s where a 1967 Impala lives. Dean’s greatest pleasure is caring for that car, handed down to him from father to son. It is not allowed to touch the salt, the snow, so it sits in the garage. Dean sometimes sits vigil.

Sam’s Prius and Dean’s green beater Ford F150 are parked streetside. In the winter, the Ford truck bears a snowplow shovel. It’s handy in a pinch. There is no snowditch that Dean cannot pull someone out of; there has not been a snowfall he cannot conquer. Everyone in Knucklebone knows it’s Dean that plows their driveways in the middle of the winter nights. He’s never told them as much but they thank him all the same.

“Normally, I call the music. But it’s your first time, so you got a favorite?”

Castiel shakes his head. Dean is caught for a moment on the wide eyes, the long dark lashes. _Look away, Winchester._ He picks out _Green River._

Out beyond the house are the wilds. Up here, in the north, they are untame, the houses quickly become staggered and lost in forest. This is the sort of terrain that gives rise to stories, to tales of witches in gingerbread houses and lost children setting down breadcrumbs. The brooklet runs serpentine through the trees, white pine and bare eastern hemlock. The rapids are not far from this clutch of trees, the rush of the water can be heard faintly in the distance, over the calls of birds. Only the very deep and the very fast waters remain unfrozen. Everything else is coated with ice and snow. The verglas on the rocks. During the day, the temperature skates up just over freezing. When the sun is bright, the air gentles slightly, teasing spring. The ground is soaked through then, heavy with snowmelt.

It is always a quiet secret, a slow heartbeat. Strange and intimate, the secure womb of the truck’s cab with just the two them quietly trading breaths and listening to the music. The snow beats down around them as a snowglobe; Dean could almost imagine that there is nothing out there past the windows, past the flakes. Perhaps existence is just this, a quiet bubble on the edge of the world.

“So, what’s your story, Cas?” Dean’s voice cuts through the silence.

“What do you mean?”

“Where are you from? What happened to you? All that jazz?” Dean is desperate to know. He wants to open Castiel up like a book, read every paragraph, consume every chapter.

“I cannot tell you,” the voice is very quiet.

“Why not?”

“Trust me, Dean. Please.”

Dean nods. He doesn’t know why he trusts the strange man but he does. It is deep within him, unquestioned. _Yeah, okay, man. I trust you._

They come to the shore of the endless and pitiless lake. Primordial. Out here, looking over this inland ocean. It is a strange thought to most men who have not visited the Great Lakes. _Lake_ is a simple word, we know what it means. They can be very large, certainly, but we sound their depths, we know their edges. The Great Lakes, with Lake Superior as their king, are vaster than imagination. They stretch out into the nothingness like inland seas. If a plane flies over the lake, it can be disorienting, wondering how the sea came out of nowhere. Lake people are ocean people. Primeval.

“The cranes come here,” Dean says, “in the summer.”

“Yes,” Castiel murmurs, “I’ve seen them.”

“They’re beautiful. We used to hunt the sandhills during the summer.” Castiel stares at him, frowning.

“You loved them so you hunted them?”

“It was just something I did with my dad, okay?” How can he explain the thrill of the chase, the high of the kill, the need to take, to own, to pull that life into the palm of his hand, to say _yes yes yes this one is mine_. It is something primal, passed down from nature, that we have never really risen from. We are all animals, base and with bared teeth, snarling and hunting, devouring the ones we have killed. (He thinks then of the white whooping crane, beautiful and untouchable. His fingers had itched to touch the long feathers, to fire a gun, to wring its neck.)

Castiel frowns, staring out of the window of the truck. Dean’s gut twists. He’s said something wrong again, he’s always saying something wrong. _Wait, stop, let me take it back. Start over._

Dean thinks of black ice, of spinning out of control. He keeps a bottle of bleach around for black ice, pours it on his tires. The exothermic reaction heats up quickly, melts the ice. Bleach won’t work here. He’s not sure what will. (He’s been spinning out of control since age nineteen, the first time he had been pressed up against a brick wall by another man, their rough and hard chests heaving at each other, sucking at mouths, at throats. Rutting, like to like. He had heard his father in the back of his mind, his father who would look at him in disgust, who would say _‘No son of mine.’_ )

* * *

Sometimes the earth hunts back. Dean remembers that day. It had been April, Dean had been sixteen years old. It is dangerous to take a boat out on Lake Superior in April. He’d wanted to sleep in on that long, sunbright morning, had chosen to not go out with his father and the fishermen. The meteorologists would later call it a sudden squall. The waves had gotten over eight feet high, there had been no chance for the small boat against those punishing fists. Sometimes Dean wonders what it is like to have no escape route, to be blocked in by fire, by water.

They had never found the bones. It is too deep too quickly, it swallows things whole. Maneater. Can you comprehend the majesty of the lake? You must give her your respect. It is the size of South Carolina, the size of Austria. It could be a country of only water, its capital at Isle Royale. There is enough water in Lake Superior to cover all of North and South America to a depth of thirty centimeters. How do you fight back against this old melted glacier? You cannot, so the bones stay down there. Jostled, perhaps, by trout, by lake sturgeon, attached to by zebra mussels. The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead.

There are two headstones for his mother and father in the little graveyard in Knucklebone. Sam goes occasionally, keeps the graves clean, settles flowers around the stones. (Dean never goes. He doesn’t see the point, there are no bodies there.)

* * *

“Cas,” Dean says, waving the other over. “I got us some trout. Some of the guys went ice fishing the other day.” He lays it out over the newsprint on the Formica countertop. “Look at her, she’s a fuckin’ beauty.” The fish shines like an oil slick in the light. It is the freshest smell, like water and seaweed.

“She is, Dean.”

“See, the stuff you get at a grocery store ain’t ever this fresh. This is like _Fresh Prince_ fresh. This is gonna be fuckin’ magic,” he looks over at Castiel, who stands over his shoulder, eyes crinkled in a soft, fond grin.

“I am sure it will be wonderful.”

“You ever filleted a fish?” Dean knows how to fabricate a fish, to cut a fillet from the bones. He can take apart a chicken, a deer, a rabbit. It’s a simple thing, the boys’ guide to hunting and fishing, that every son of northern Michigan inherits. They joke that the opening of hunting season, deep in the middle of November, should be a state holiday.

Castiel shakes his head. It is not a surprise, there appears to be little that the man has done. Dean has more questions after three weeks than answers. _Pretty sure you’re an alien, buddy. But you’re cool in my book._

“Alright, I’m gonna show you,” he says, rolling his sleeves up past his elbows, “it’s all in the knife.” A filleting knife is long and slender, it bends like a willow switch. There are many techniques, ways to approach the disarticulation, but Dean goes with the way his father had taught him. He makes a long slice just behind the head, nestles the knife with a slight bend down to the rib bones. It sounds like a drumbeat. He is practiced and the knife is sharp as a razor, so the flesh peels off easily in one clean stroke. Flip it over, try the other side. Castiel watches, standing always a bit too close for Dean’s comfort. Dean is intensely focused on their proximity, his heart speeds up to match the drum of the blade against the fishbones. He is not sure if he wants the other man to move away. He is not sure of anything lately.

“You’re very good at that, Dean,” Castiel breathes. Visions of other reasons that Cas might say that to him flash through Dean’s mind. He shifts uncomfortably, grateful suddenly for closely-fitting boxer briefs. (Visions of a tangle of limbs, of fierce mouths, of _yes yes yes more._ ) He shudders slightly. _Christ, Cas, don’t say shit like that to me._ He is itchy below the collar, restless and volatile.

* * *

  
“What do you mean, you’ve never seen _Star Wars_?” Dean asks incredulously, as filled with dismay as he is with delight. Over the past month, Dean has learned that Castiel has seen approximately zero movies. He has set himself as Castiel’s personal guide to the _Dean Winchester Guide to Everything Awesome._ “Where are you from, Mars?”

Castiel shrugs, a quirk to the mouth. “My family traveled a lot, we didn’t have time to watch movies.”

“Well, fuck, Cas. Guess it’s lucky that you found me, cause I’m gonna teach you _everything._ ” (They have already worked through the Indiana Jones trilogy and _Alien,_ through _Ghostbusters_ and _Battlestar Galactica._ They sit side by side on the couch, the lazyboy chair forgotten, in comfortable companionship. Sometimes Sam catches them on his walk to the kitchen, Dean sees him smirk from the distance. He glares at Sam, but there’s no spirit in it.)

“Yes,” the quiet rumble of a voice agrees, “it is very lucky.” Dean looks away, hides the faint stain that paints his cheekbones, the tips of his ears. It is blotchy on his chest and neck, he knows, his blush is always hot and strange. (It is better later, on the overstuffed corduroy couch, sitting comfortably near each other. Castiel agrees with Dean’s assessment of the trilogy, that _Empire_ is clearly superior. Dean is chuffed, flushed. He laughs a little to hide his pleasure.)

“Who’s your favorite?” Dean asks, picking at invisible lint on his jeans, trying not to look at the cornflower eyes of the other man.

Castiel pauses, head tilted in his contemplation. (Dean has learned that Cas always tilts his head when he is deep in thought. Dean absolutely does not find it charming.) “I am fond of the man in the vest. The one with the gun.”

“Han Solo, Cas. His name is _Han Solo_.” But Dean is grinning, “Good choice, buddy, ‘cause Han is awesome.”

An odd thing then, when Castiel goes to his bedroom. Dean picks up the glasses, turns off the television, goes to turn out the light. A bit of white gleams on the brown fabric of the couch. There is a long pale feather. He is not sure where it has come from, but it is beautiful. He picks it up, studies it against the light. Puts it in his pocket. When he gets back to his bedroom, he carefully presses the feather between the pages of a book. Something about it feels otherworldly and magical.

Perhaps it’s the whiskey talking. He remembers them watching the movie, remembers looking at the pale skin, the hair dark as shadows, as the vast expanse of space. The eyes the color of the lake, the color of the veins on the underside of a wrist, of frostbitten lips. Castiel had glanced at Dean’s focus, raised his ink-painted brows in query. Dean had said nothing more than “ _Watch the movie, Cas.”_ What is there to say? _I think I’m in love with you._ Dean loves easily, though he claims otherwise, but it is always a shallow love. Not like this. With the others, he has only craved the present, the right here and right now. He had never cared of their histories, where past lovers had touched their skin, where future lovers might lay a kiss. Watching Cas, he is desperate to learn everything about the enigmatic man. _Where are you going, where have you been? Who has loved you? Who have you loved? I want a map of where they have touched you. I want to mark you, make you off-limits. I will write ‘Dean Winchester was here’ on your chest, your ribs. If anyone dares touch you, they will know that I loved you once._

He groans, scrunching his eyes. _Go to sleep, you idiot._

It is a terrifying thing, falling. Either from a cliff or in love. There is a reason we use the same words, it is the same feeling whether you stand at the edge of a precipice or watch your feeble heart tumble into the deep. This is why we hope to catch flight, spread our wings, protect ourselves. By the time you realize what is happening, you are too far gone.

But the awful truth is, that if you want to fly, you have to step out into the air. To fly, first you must fall.

* * *

What about storms?

Consider then archaeology. Those old historians without words. You can tell a story without ever writing a sentence. We were not there on November 10th, 1975, but we can read the terror in the wreck of the ship at the bottom of the lake. We know that, as the National Weather Service upgraded their storm warnings to gale, the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald altered its course northward to seek the protection of the Canadian coastline. The storm swelled. At one in the morning, the ship reported winds of fifty-two knots, waves over ten feet high. The terror rises, increasing from gale to storm.

The last communication we have ever received from that wretched wreck came just after seven in the evening. A full eighteen hours of terror after the storm had begun, it sends a chill down the spine, the sailors must have known. The _S.S. Arthur M. Anderson_ asked how they were doing. The Fitzgerald’s last words come to us there, across that stretch of inland ocean, saying _we are holding our own._ The ship and its crew is lost then, to the light and the surface, as the gales of November had come early.

It only takes a storm to drown. Dean is drowning, he does not know how to swim when Castiel is near. He has forgotten to heed the lake warnings. How do you come up for air?

* * *

April is a strange and unsettling month in northern Michigan. The rest of the country talks of April showers, calendars proudly display photos of green grass and robust red tulips. Not up here, where winter still holds sway. Spring chips away, warming here and retreating there. Sometimes it snows, sometimes it is beautiful. Storms happen often in the transition months, April and November. The _Fitzgerald_ had sunk in November, in one of these peculiar storms. Castiel has lived with the Winchesters for six weeks; it has been a storm.

Castiel stares out at the lake from the back porch. There are one-hundred and twenty stairs down from the porch to the lakeshore. The earliest cranes are settling. It promises summer, it has been so long since summer. White pine and sugar maple line the shore, the long reedy grasses are still pale yellow and dead from the long winter. They will revive. All things go.

“I miss my family,” Castiel says. It is quiet and dark.

“Where are they?” Dean asks, keeping his tone carefully neutral. Cas had asked him not to pry and he has not. He is not usually a careful man, known to say all the wrong things, to barrel in where he is unwanted. Castiel is different, he is careful.

“Away.”

“Can’t you go see them?”

“No,” Castiel says, hesitant, “not anymore.”

Dean nods. He remembers his mother. At four years old, he had left his sandy sneakers in a pile at the door. At the top of the stairs, where the north and east corners joined, was his parents’ room. The sun had spent so long beating at it that it had crept in and fallen into the cracks of the weathered floor. The bed was soft, unmade, and smelled of his mother’s hyacinth perfume. Late lilacs sat in makeshift milk bottle vases. Old pillowcases but still good, his mother had said. She had not bought new ones in years. Egyptian cotton, 120 count thread. They’d been a wedding present. He had closed his eyes and inhaled her scent, her presence. Clean and sharp, gardenia and denim. She was the smell of sunbleach. Downstairs, he had found Sam curled up in his mother’s lap, his head against her chest. She had stared out the window, unaware of the blue light that painted the sharp planes of her face. She had been pensive.

This is one of the few memories Dean gets to keep. He is forty now. Each year steals another memory of his long-lost mother, drags it under, down below the waves.

* * *

At first, as Dean opens the door to Castiel’s bedroom, heavy with a pile of laundry, he is not sure what he sees.

It starts with a white crane.

The crane is in the center of the room. Strange and surreal. _How did you get in here?_ (Even in the face of the obvious, we resist Occam’s simple razor.) The bird stares at him frankly, almost with a challenge and oddly absent of fear. It steps into the break of the dawn light, coming through the open window. A shift, a punch to the gut. An explosion of gold and light, a blinding flare floods Dean’s vision. The feathers fly, are subsumed into a growth of skin, of black hair and blue eyes. Dean’s head is thrown back in the explosion, sparks of light burn his skin like rogue electricity.

_This cannot be real._

When the glimmer falls from his eyes, Castiel is hunched in front of him, bare and tired. He is worn and exhausted yet beautiful as thunder, beautiful as lightning. Dean doesn’t want to stare, so he looks away. (It does not matter, he will always remember this moment. The blazing and incandescent beast that was Castiel, splendid and ethereal and not made for Dean’s dirty hands, his filthy touch.)

“Dean, can you hand me some clothing please?” Castiel’s voice, sure and steady as the earth. As the rotation of the planets, the rise and setting of the sun.

“Um, sure, Cas.” He shoves a hand into the closest drawer, careful to keep his eyes averted as if they would burn. He finds a shirt, a pair of shorts, and tosses them in the direction of the bed. His hands shake. He tries to keep still, hide the trembling. “You’re … the crane,” he says, “the one I saw.”

“Yes, Dean,” Castiel’s voice is oddly flat. It is deliberate, it itches at Dean’s skin, wrong and strange. Cas never hides his emotions from Dean, the absence of them is stark and awful. “And you can turn around now.”

“What the _fuck_?”

Castiel closes his eyes, the clear weariness rings out from him, his expression, his pinched face. “Do you remember how the story goes? Once upon a time, there was a little crane,” he says in that gravel voice. Dean shakes his head. He feels like he is slamming into a brick wall. Frustration and confusion rise in his throat like bile, sit on the back of his tongue. _What the fuck are you talking about?_

“No,” he interrupts, “that’s a fuckin’ _fairytale._ Fairytales aren’t _real_.” (He is drowning, bobbing in the water. His hands try to beat at the surface tension, raise him above for desperate gulps of air.)

Castiel glares at him, eyes like Neptune, “Aren’t they? Then who am I?”

 _Breathe,_ Dean focuses on the rise and fall of his own chest, _in and out. In and out._ “Cas,” he closes his eyes, tries to ground himself in something, in anything. “You’re gonna have to tell me everything. You gotta go slow, okay? Start at the beginning.”

Cas swallows, nods. “Do you remember-“ he starts, slow and deliberate, “do you remember a crane with a thorn in its’ wing?” Dean does, he had found the injured creature two years ago. Had pulled the thorn out, patted the wing. Let it go. He had often wondered if the crane in the parking lot was the same one, but it had seemed like too odd of a coincidence.

“When you said you missed your family,” Dean says, “is it because of this? Because you’re human?”

“Yes, I cannot communicate with them while in human form,” The shoulders slope down, eyes close.

“Can you - can you go back?”

“Theoretically, yes. I am … missing some of the tools I would require to complete the spell.”

“What do you need?”

“My feathers,” there is a mournful note in his tone.

Dean quirks a brow, dread pooling in his stomach, “You don’t have feathers?”

“I do, but I have lost a few since arriving. I do not know where they are but I know they are missing.” Hot guilt paints Dean, he thinks of the white feathers he has found and tucked away between the pages of a book. Castiel’s feathers. His anchor. _You need to give them back. Say something, you idiot._

“Do you,” Dean looks away, swallows around the lump in his unforgiving throat, “do you want to go back?” _Please say no, please, God. If you do one thing for me (you never have before), if you do one goddamn thing for me, let me have this._

Castiel sighs, runs a hand through his dark hair, “At least for awhile, I never had a chance to say goodbye.”

“What about now, you were just transformed, weren’t you?”

A deep frown, “I can transform when there is moonlight. But it is temporary. And I am limited in my movement.”

Dean nods. _Breathe, just breathe. You’re gonna figure this shit out, alright? You’re Dean Winchester, you’re gonna figure this shit out._ “You’re my best friend, Cas, but whatever you need, okay?”

“Dean,” Castiel stares at him. Dean squirms under the frank eye contact, studied like a creature in a bell jar. “You know the story. Friendship isn’t why I’m here. I understand if you don’t feel the same way, but I need to go back if you don’t. It’s where I belong.” Dean screams at himself silently. _Say something, say something, say something._

“Fuck,” he breathes out, runs a hand through fawn-colored hair. “Cas, I -“ Castiel’s shoulders slump slightly. He looks down at the Berber carpet for a moment, breathing in, chest rising sharply, as if he is drawing strength from the air around him.

“I understand,” Cas says, low and dark. “I’d like you to leave now. Please.”

_Say something._

Dean goes, latching the door behind him. In his own room, he pulls down a bottle of bourbon and doesn’t bother with a glass.

* * *

All lakepeople know the terror of drowning. Dean had learned quickly, like all of those on the shoreline do, of what a riptide looks like. It is a quiet patch of water, treacherously still. He knows how quickly the weather can turn up there, as Michigan weather is famous for doing. The sky clouds up, a murky fog, black winds, bleak rain.

The largest ships cast out into the water in misplaced confidence. The _Titanic_ had worn this hubris, as had the _Edmund Fitzgerald._ It had been larger than most ships on the lakes, huge and cast together in Wisconsin. How can a giant be felled? How can this work of art of iron and steel, this pride of the American midwest, ever fall? We always assume forever. (The historians know there is no such thing as _forever._ All names are eventually forgotten, all statues are eroded by wind and dust, all cities fall.)

If you are given the possibility of _forever,_ how can you let it go?

 _Go to sleep now, you fool._ (Dean pulls the pillow over his head, grimacing into the mattress.)

* * *

He knocks on Castiel’s door in the morning. It takes several moments to hear movement, for the night-colored bedhead to appear at the door.

“Hello, Dean,” Castiel says. Dean grimaces, taking in the greyish skin, the red-rimmed eyes. _I’m so sorry._

“Here,” he says, roughvoiced. In his large hands are several long white feathers, perfectly preserved and cared for. “Look, Cas, I - I didn’t know,” he breathes, “I didn’t know I was hurting you.” He is like the rest of men. The men, the hunters, who had driven the whooping crane to near extinction, had hunted them to twenty-three lonely birds. He wonders suddenly if he had ever aimed a rifle at Castiel, had ever told himself it was just a pale Sandhill. Men are good at lying to themselves. “These are yours, aren’t they? I didn’t know, Cas, I’m so sorry, buddy. I’m sorta keeping you here, right? I can’t do that to you, Cas. You gotta take these.”

The long fingers take the feathers with a gentle touch, almost reverent. Cas stares at them for a long stretch. “I could leave you if you give these to me,” Castiel says, his voice very strangely flat. “I might never return.”

“I know,” Dean whispers, “You might not. But I’ll wait, I’ll learn all the crane calls.” He looks down, his hands shoved deep within his jean pockets. “But if you do stay, I want it to be because you came to me willingly. Cas, I want you to _want_ this”

A deep pause, a breath. _Steady, go on._ “‘Cause, fuck, I want this. I want you. I can’t even tell you how much. I think I’ll fuckin’ explode with it when I look at you.” Wide-eyes look up at him in wonder. Dean watches Castiel’s chest heave with rapid breath, hyperventilation.

“Dean,” voice like the wine-dark deep, “I always come when you call.” Dean stares, wide-eyed (green like meadows) at the other man. This surreal, otherworldly creature. He seems so human now, standing before Dean with broad shoulders and a bit of sweat on his brow and a dark beard starting to shadow his jaw. Dean wonders now if he is human throughout or if there are vestigial remnants of his crane body. Perhaps his bones are hollow. _How can I ask you to stay here with me? In this nothing town, this nothing house, (this nothing me)? You can fly when you are not with me, how can I ask you to stop?_

“I’ll come back,” Cas says. He always looks at Dean with unbroken eye contact, unnerving in its inhumanness. (He doesn’t look at Dean now.)

* * *

It is a long-standing truth that we do not know how to sound the depths of love without the fear of loss. It is not until love is removed from us that we can fill up the void, the space left behind, with water. Pour it out again into a volume beaker, measure it in milliliters. Then, with this scientific approach, we can say _this is how much I loved you._ It is not until Castiel’s bed is empty, the truck cab is empty, that Dean realizes the strange ache in his fingers, his chest, his skin. His ache has never been physical before. There have been women, yes, who have left him. Sent the old _Dear John_. (Dean is used to being left behind, it has never hurt before.)

He picks up the clothes that Castiel has left behind. The shirts, the soft jeans (worn to nothingness), the terrycloth robe. They smell of him, that strange human and unexplainable smell of other places and dead skin, salt and other lives. He buries his face in the shirts, in their collars which had reveled in Castiel’s neck. Breathe in deeply. _Come back, please, please come back._

The deepest longing is for places we are not. Dean likes to keep a map on the wall, a Mercator projection, and he prods it with thumbtacks for all the places he will someday go. He has crisscrossed the contiguous forty-eight states in the Impala, Sam riding shotgun and AC/DC on the stereo. He knows where all the Mystery Spots are, where the terrain grows wild and rocky with mountains, where to stop to grab some gas, a bottle of Coke. He thinks of the other map that he has never visited, never fully explored. Castiel’s body is like a medieval map of the world, beyond the Atlantic, beyond his shirt collar, it reads _here be dragons._ Dean aches to trail his fingers like pilgrims down Castiel’s spine, bumpy as a mountain road. He has always been a kinesthetic learner, preferring to learn by hands, by feet, by doing. So he would learn the map of Castiel by touch, he would leave no rock unturned.

Castiel had said, “I’ll come back.” Dean sews those words up like jewelry in the lining of his coat. Keeps them like a photograph in a locket. Puts them away, takes them back out again. _I need you, Cas._

He keeps the windows open, although it is cold. Listens for birdsong. The breath of the wind.

* * *

In May, the storm ends. Castiel does not come back as a bird, he walks up the gravel road as any man might. Dean watches him the whole time, peering through the window, holding back the curtains. Castiel’s hair is dark as the deep sea, as India ink. His skin the color of parchment. Wearing an ill-fitting and rumpled suit and a flapping pale blue tie, his trenchcoat always slightly overlarge. Dean doesn’t wait for him to knock, he flings the front door open. Cas stands on the threshold, mouth hung perfectly open in surprise.

“You came back,” Dean breathes. How can joy feel like a gunshot? He is certain he is bleeding, somewhere there beneath the flannel shirt. In the moment, it all deranges you. Pleasure or pain, it doesn’t matter. He cannot breathe. All emotions strip you naked, flay the skin, leave you open before God and man for judgment.

“I always come back to you,” Castiel says, the hint of a smile on his lips. _Fuck, I need you._

Dean hesitates, “How long?”

Castiel tilts his head, those damnable pale eyes gentle. He spreads his hands, “As long as I can stay.”

It has never been like this before. Dean is no stranger to lust but he kisses Castiel like he is seeking, opening a book and exploring the table of contents. Each curve of a muscle is a promise of a paragraph. He wants to go slow, to see if he can touch his skin to every available surface. Cas’ chest (heaving, short of breath), his arms, each singular eyelash, the insides, mouth and body. Dean traces the straight nose, severe and unyielding. The mouth casts opposite (Castiel is full of contradictions), it is soft and open, it contains possibilities. There is never harshness held on his tongue, which knows nothing of betrayal.

 _Don’t say it._ (He should not say it, it is cheap with all the times he has said it before. Half-meant, always thrown against a wall hoping it will stick. Hoping he will grow into it. If you say it, they will come. Sometimes, _I love you_ has been a dagger meant to cut, thrown out after a hurt. A little salt, only half-true, to grind in the wound.) Because Dean loves Castiel he does not say it, those simple words that might stick to Cas like an anchor, drag him down to the deep.

“Have you ever done this before?” Dean asks, trailing fingers over firm pectorals, wondering who put this body together, where it had come from.

“Before, you mean?” Cas breathes, “As a crane?”

“Yes,” Dean says, “You can’t just say that to people, you know. The crane thing. It’s not normal, Cas.”

“Why can’t they know, Dean?” That tilt of the head, open and curious eyes.

“Just trust me, Cas, can you trust me on that?”

“Of course.”

“Let me show you something,” he says and swallows Castiel down in one go, mouth wide, sucking like a lamprey eel. Castiel cries out at the touch. It tastes like salt, smells like brackish water, like the sea. Salt is critical for life, for maintaining blood pressure, equilibrium, so it is natural to assume that Castiel is critical to Dean’s life. It is the taste of oysters, of sucking blood from a wound, of saltwort that grows in marshes. Cas doesn’t have to be taught to fuck, to rut into the touch. It is there, encoded in our DNA. We come into this world and leave it without ever knowing why but we always know how to make love. Dean feels Cas’ fingers hook beneath his jawbone, drawing him up, kissing softly and tucking his tongue within the lower lip. Teeth sometimes, nothing others. Hot breath and sweat and trading spaces, moments. Here one moment and there the next. (When Castiel kisses him, Dean wonders if he has ever been kissed before. Lips have touched his own, yes, but what is the measure of a kiss without passion, without love?) “Do you want me to stop?” he whispers into the bend of Castiel’s neck.

“No,” Cas says, “but I had to kiss you.”

“God, Cas, Jesus fuckin’ Christ, you’re somethin’ else.”

“You’re shaking, Dean,” Cas murmurs.

“It’s just the cold air.” (It is not, the air is nothing compared to the heat between them. Where they touch is like a defibrillator, shocking hearts into dysrhythmia.) Dean works a wide and suntanned hand between their stomachs, down, further down. Takes Castiel in hand (that rush of breath), slides his hand up and down again steady as a train. Steady as the beat of waves against the shore. When he comes finally, gasping on the exhale, he grips at Castiel and thinks of storms and phosphorescence.

* * *

  
In one timeline, there is a harbor. Perhaps in this timeline, the ships keep to the Ontario shore, ride out the storm. When the clouds break, the sailors cheer. Set sail. Dean looks out over the halcyon winds. It is cloudless, that faint strange light, called the zodiacal light, which hesitates in the sky just before true dawn.

Castiel is asleep. Never a morning person, he is sprawled across the bed, his arms thrown out like ropes. His shoulder blades jut out, strong and bony, something like wings.

How does the story end? The little crane who fell in love with a prince. Who had given up everything, his home, his family, his language, his very body. Love is consumptive, it is unkind. Dean does not know how long Castiel will stay. Dean has never trusted promises of _forever._ What we mean in one moment is not always true in the next. But it is quiet now and calm.

Think then of shipwrecks, the sunken creatures at the bottom of the lake. The Edmund Fitzgerald is down there, rusted and rotten. His father, picked clean by lake trout and perch, whitefish. Someone will fish them up, take a knife against their heads, the dorsal fin, pull the flesh from the bones. Dean doesn’t eat the fish from the lake. Some storms rise up, cast over the ship. We cannot control everything, the winds, the rain, the sea. (Our hearts, those old illogical betrayers.) Sometimes, we sink deep. Desperate and aching. There is a storm, perhaps one lifeboat. Dean will hold onto it for Castiel, in case he ever asks.

He sets the cup of coffee down on the side table. His is across the room. These are the little things. Dean has never been good with words so he says _I love you_ in small acts. Changes the oil without asking, makes Castiel’s favorite foods, wakes him up with a cup of fresh and dark coffee. He climbs into bed, straddles Cas’ legs, the broad and strong thighs. Castiel likes to sleep on his stomach, his back is thrown to the world, to the sky. Dean studies the dips and curves of the sinew and skin with his eyes, his gentle touch. Leans in close to the curl of the ear, hot breath trapped between them, the curl of Castiel’s pitch-dark hair tickling his chin. “I love you,” he whispers. He will not say it often, he squirms with the truth of it. It is for the quiet moments when no one is watching, when it is just them, he and Cas against the world. _You came back, I’ll make it up to you. I promise, Cas._

“I can hear you, you know,” Cas murmurs into the pillow. His face turns, red lines of the pillow imprinted on his skin.

“Shut up, Cas,” he playfully pushes the other man. Castiel grips his wrists, pulls him down alongside his relaxed body. He is warm and slow with sleep. Dean closes his eyes when Castiel touches him, those strong, neatly-clipped hands indexing his arms, the curve of his belly, the curls lower still. With his eyes closed, he cannot tell how many hands Castiel has, does not know where the next pressure is coming. Each touch is a surprise and he arches into it, moaning quietly.

“Shh,” Cas says, “Don’t wake Sam.”

“Ugh, don’t ever talk about him in bed again -” Cas knows how to shut Dean up, so he seals his mouth against Dean’s, trails his tongue in and out like a wave lapping at the shore. Cas rolls Dean over, straddles on top of him, this firm and solid form of absolute humanity. Dean relishes the reality of Castiel’s form, this body. _Where did this come from?_ (It doesn’t matter, they are here now and in love.) He feels hot desire pulse through him with Castiel’s weight. “God, I want you,” he whispers into Cas. Into the other man’s eyes, his mouth.

“Yes,” Castiel says, closing his eyes and rutting against Dean. Hard against hard, ache against ache. They rock, slick and sweating, like a ship at sea. (When Dean finally comes, his mind goes white, bright as the sky, bright as fire. Bright as the snowdrifts and pale feathers. He grips at Cas’ bicep, pants and groans and cries _Oh my god, Cas, oh my fucking god, Jesus Christ, fuck._ )

Once upon a time, there lived a young prince who met a beautiful white crane. The crane loved him, came ashore and gave up his wings, and the prince said _you do not have to do this._ The crane had touched his lips, the planes of his face, and said, _I will love you forever._

How do the stories end? Oh yes, let us borrow the old words.

_Happily ever after._


End file.
